The Dutch psychologist Diederik Stapel was found to have published
fabricated data in 30 peer-reviewed papers. Photograph: Hollandse Hoogte/Boxem

Dirk Smeesters had spent several years of his career as a social
psychologist at Erasmus University in Rotterdam studying how consumers
behaved in different situations. Did colour have an effect on what they
bought? How did death-related stories in the media affect how people picked
products? And was it better to use supermodels in cosmetics adverts than
average-looking women?The questions are certainly intriguing, but
unfortunately for anyone wanting truthful answers, some of
Smeesters' work turned out to be fraudulent. The psychologist, who
admitted "massaging" the data in some of his papers, resigned from his
position in June after being investigated by his university, which had been
tipped off by Uri Simonsohn from the University of Pennsylvania in
Philadelphia. Simonsohn carried out an independent analysis of the data and
was suspicious of how perfect many of Smeesters' results seemed when,
statistically speaking, there should have been more variation in his
measurements.

The case, which led to two scientific papers being
retracted, came on the heels of an even bigger fraud, uncovered last year,
perpetrated by the Dutch psychologist Diederik Stapel. He was found to have
fabricated data for years and published it in at least 30 peer-reviewed
papers, including a
report in the journal Science about how untidy environments may
encourage discrimination.The cases have sent shockwaves through a
discipline that was already facing serious questions about plagiarism.

"In many respects, psychology is at a crossroads -- the decisions we take
now will determine whether or not it remains a serious, credible, scientific
discipline along with the harder sciences," says Chris Chambers, a
psychologist at Cardiff University.

"We have to be open about the
problems that exist in psychology and understand that, though they're not
unique to psychology, that doesn't mean we shouldn't be addressing them. If
we do that, we can end up leading the other sciences rather than following
them."

Cases of scientific misconduct tend to hit the headlines
precisely because scientists are supposed to occupy a moral high ground when
it comes to the search for truth about nature. The scientific method
developed as a way to weed out human bias. But scientists, like anyone else,
can be prone to bias in their bid for a place in the history books.

Increasing competition for shrinking government budgets for
research and the
disproportionately large rewards for publishing in the best journals have
exacerbated the temptation to fudge results or ignore inconvenient data.

Massaged results can send other researchers down the wrong track, wasting
time and money trying to replicate them. Worse, in medicine, it can delay
the development of life-saving treatments or prolong the use of therapies
that are ineffective or dangerous. Malpractice comes to light rarely,
perhaps because scientific fraud is often easy to perpetrate but hard to
uncover.

The field of
psychology has come under particular scrutiny because many results in
the scientific literature defy replication by other researchers. Critics say
it is too easy to publish psychology papers which rely on sample sizes that
are too small, for example, or to publish only those results that support a
favoured hypothesis. Outright fraud is almost certainly just a small part of
that problem, but high-profile examples have exposed a greyer area of bad or
lazy scientific practice that many had preferred to brush under the carpet.

Many scientists, aided by software and statistical techniques to catch
cheats, are now speaking up, calling on colleagues to put their houses in
order.

Those who document misconduct in scientific research talk of a
spectrum of bad practices. At the sharp end are plagiarism, fabrication and
falsification of research. At the other end are questionable practices such
as adding an author's name to a paper when they have not contributed to the
work, sloppiness in methods or not disclosing conflicts of interest.

"Outright fraud is somewhat impossible to estimate, because if you're really
good at it you wouldn't be detectable," said Simonsohn, a social
psychologist. "It's like asking how much of our money is fake money -- we
only catch the really bad fakers, the good fakers we never catch."

If
things go wrong, the responsibility to investigate and punish misconduct
rests with the scientists' employers, the academic institution. But these
organisations face something of a conflict of interest. "Some of the big
institutions -- were really in denial and wanted to say that it didn't happen
under their roof," says Liz Wager of the Committee on Publication Ethics
(Cope). "They're gradually realising that it's better to admit that it could
happen and tell us what you're doing about it, rather than to say, 'It could
never happen.'"

There are indications that bad practice --
particularly at the less serious end of the scale -- is rife. In 2009,
Daniele Fanelli of the University of Edinburgh carried out a meta-analysis
that pooled the results of 21 surveys of researchers who were asked whether
they or their colleagues had fabricated or falsified research.

Publishing his
results in the journal PLoS One, he found that an average of 1.97% of
scientists admitted to having "fabricated, falsified or modified data or
results at least once -- a serious form of misconduct by any standard -- and
up to 33.7% admitted other questionable research practices. In surveys
asking about the behaviour of colleagues, admission rates were 14.12% for
falsification, and up to 72% for other questionable research practices."

A 2006 analysis of the images published in the Journal of Cell Biology
found that about 1% had been deliberately falsified.

Rise in retractions

According to
a report
in the journal Nature, published retractions in scientific journals have
increased around 1,200% over the past decade, even though the number of
published papers had gone up by only 44%. Around half of these retractions
are suspected cases of misconduct.

Wager says these numbers make it
difficult for a large research-intensive university, which might employ
thousands of researchers, to maintain the line that misconduct is
vanishingly rare.

New tools, such as text-matching software, have
also increased the detection rates of fraud and plagiarism. Journals
routinely use these to check papers as they are submitted or undergoing peer
review. "Just the fact that the software is out there and there are people
who can look at stuff, that has really alerted the world to the fact that
plagiarism and redundant publication are probably way more common than we
realised," says Wager. "That probably explains, to a big extent, this
increase we've seen in retractions."

Ferric Fang, a professor at the
University of Washington School of Medicine and editor in chief of the
journal Infection and Immunity, thinks
increased scrutiny is not the only factor and that the rate of retractions
is indicative of some deeper problem.

He was alerted to concerns
about the work of a Japanese scientist who had published in his journal. A
reviewer for another journal noticed that Naoki Mori of the University of
the Ryukyus in Japan had duplicated images in some of his papers and had
given them different labels, as if they represented different measurements.
An investigation revealed evidence of widespread data manipulation and this
led Fang to retract six of Mori's papers from his journal. Other journals
followed suit.

Self-correction

The refrain from many
scientists is that the scientific method is meant to be self-correcting. Bad
results, corrupt data or fraud will get found out -- either when they cannot
be replicated or when they are proved incorrect in subsequent studies -- and
public retractions are a sign of strength.

That works up to a point,
says Fang. "It ended up that there were 31 papers from the [Mori] laboratory
that were retracted, many of those papers had been in the literature for
five-10 years," he says. "I realised that 'scientific literature is
self-correcting' is a little bit simplistic. These papers had been read many
times, downloaded, cited and reviewed by peers and it was just by the chance
observation by a very attentive reviewer that opened this whole case of
serious misconduct."

Extraordinary claims that change the paradigm
for a field will elicit lots of attention and people will look at the
results very carefully. But cases such as Dr Mori's -- where work is flawed
and falsified but the results themselves are not particularly surprising or
sensational and may even corroborated by others who perform their
experiments legitimately -- the misconduct is difficult to detect. "It's not
that the results are wrong, it's that the data are false," says Fang.

And, often, research studies are very difficult to replicate. "If
someone says they did a 15-year clinical study with 9,000 subjects and they
publish their results, you may have to take their word for it because you're
not going to be able to run out and recruit 9,000 patients of your own and
do a 15-year study just to try to corroborate something that somebody else
has done," says Fang. "A number of cases recently have come to light only
because the investigators didn't have institutional review board approval
for their studies. Upon digging deeper, the institutions questioned whether
any of the studies were done at all. This kind of misconduct is very
difficult to detect otherwise."

Selective publishing

In psychology
research, there is a particular problem with researchers who selectively
publish some of their experiments to guarantee a positive result. "Let's say
you have this theory that, when you play Mozart, people want to pay more for
musical instruments," says Simonsohn. "So you do a study and you play Mozart
(or not) and you ask people, 'How much would you pay for a piano or flute
and five instruments?'"

If it turned out that only the price of a
single type of instrument, violins, say, went up after people had listened
to Mozart, it would be possible to publish a research paper that omitted the
fact that the researchers had ever asked about any other instruments. This
would not allow the reader to make a proper assessment of the strength of
the effect that Mozart may (or may not) have on how much a person would pay
for musical instruments.

Fanelli has examined this positive result bias. He looked at 4,600
studies across all disciplines between 1990 and 2007, and counted the number
of papers that, after declaring an intent to test a particular hypothesis,
reported a positive support for it. The overall frequency of positive
supports had grown by more than 22% over this time period. In
a separate study, Fanelli found that "the odds of reporting a positive
result were around five times higher among papers in the disciplines of
psychology and psychiatry and economics and business compared with space
science".

Culture of neophilia

This issue is exacerbated in
psychological research by the "file-drawer" problem, a situation when
scientists who try to replicate and confirm previous studies find it
difficult to get their research published. Scientific journals want to
highlight novel, often surprising, findings. Negative results are
unattractive to journal editors and lie in the bottom of researchers' filing
cabinets, destined never to see the light of day.

"We have a culture
which values novelty above all else, neophilia really, and that creates a
strong publication bias," says Chambers. "To get into a good journal, you
have to be publishing something novel, it helps if it's counter-intuitive
and it also has to be a positive finding. You put those things together and
you create a dangerous problem for the field."

There is no suggestion of misconduct in Bem's research but the
lack of an avenue in which to publish failed attempts at replication
suggests self-correction can be compromised and people such as Smeesters and
Stapel can remain undetected for a long time.

In some cases,
misconduct (or fraud) has grave implications. In 2006, Anil Potti and
colleagues at Duke University reported in the New England Journal of
Medicine that they had developed a way to track the progression of a
patient's lung cancer with a device, called an expression array, that could
monitor the activity of thousands of different genes. In a subsequent report
in Nature Medicine, the same scientists wrote about a way to use their
expression array to work out which drugs would work best for individual
patients with lung, breast or ovarian cancer, depending on their patterns of
gene activity. Within months of that publication, the biostatisticians Keith
Baggerly and Kevin Coombes of the MD Anderson Cancer Centre in Houston had
their doubts, and began uncovering major flaws in the work.

"It
looked so promising that they actually started to do trials of cancer
patients, they chose the chemotherapy depending on this test," says Wager.
"The test has turned out to be completely invalid, so people were getting
the wrong therapy, because the paper was not retracted quickly enough."
Blowing the whistle

Despite Baggerly and Coombes raising the alarm
several times with the institutions involved, it was not until 2010 that
Potti resigned from Duke University and several of the papers referring to
his work on the expression array were retracted."Usually there is no
official mechanism for a whistleblower to take if they suspect fraud," says
Chambers. "You often hear of cases where junior members of a department,
such as PhD students, will be the ones that are closest to the coalface and
will be the ones to identify suspicious cases. But what kind of support do
they have? ... That's a big issue that needs to be addressed."

In
July this year, a group of the UK's main research funders and university
groups published a
Concordat to Support Research Integrity. "I don't think anyone would
want to see a command-control direct regulation approach here," says
Christopher Hale, deputy director of policy at Universities UK. "The
concordat ... outlines a framework and then identifies how people fit within
that and what actions they will take forward to strengthen it." The
concordat requires institutions to have a process in place for dealing with
misconduct, which includes appointing a senior person at the institution who
can provide the necessary leadership and oversight during investigations.

Michael Farthing, vice-chair of the UK Research Integrity Office and
vice-chancellor of the University of Sussex, has been a long-time campaigner
on getting institutions and funders to take research misconduct seriously.
In a recent
article for Times Higher Education, Farthing said he supported the
concordat but that it would not be enough. He stopped short of suggesting a
statutory regulator for research but wrote: "Government and research leaders
should take action to support and encourage excellence in research
integrity, not sit on their hands until -- as has happened in other countries
-- a scandal drives them towards legislation."

Statements of principle
are one thing -- every university and research council probably already has
one applauding honourable research and deploring fraud -- the key is the
steps institutions take in understanding and de-incentivising misconduct.

The economics of science

The pressure to commit misconduct is
complex. Arturo Casadevall of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New
York and editor in chief of the journal mBio, places a large part of the
blame on the economics of science. "What is happening in recent years is
that the rewards have become too high, for example, for publishing in
certain journals. Just like we see the problem in sports that, if you
compete and you get a reward, it translates into everything from money and
endorsements and things like that. People begin to take risks because the
rewards are disproportionate."

As a PhD student in the 1980s,
Casadevall says he published research in a few different journals depending
on what his research was about. "Within 10 years, all you heard was, 'Where
is the paper going to be published?' not 'What's in it?'. Scientists have
got into this idea that where you publish determines the value of the work
and that's crazy. What's important is what's in the paper."

Casadevall and Fang are aware that their spotlight on misconduct has the
potential to show up scientists in a disproportionately bad light -- as yet
another public institution that cannot be trusted beyond its own
self-interest. But they say staying quiet about the issue is not an option.

"Science has the potential to address some of the most important
problems in society and for that to happen, scientists have to be trusted by
society and they have to be able to trust each others' work," Fang says. "If
we are seen as just another special interest group that are doing whatever
it takes to advance our careers and that the work is not necessarily
reliable, it's tremendously damaging for all of society because we need to
be able to rely on science."

For Simonsohn, the biggest issue with
outright fraud is not that the bad scientist gets caught but the corrupting
effect the work can have on the scientific literature. To reduce the
potential negative effects dramatically, Simonsohn suggests requiring
scientists to post their data online. "That's very minimal cost and it has
many benefits beyond reduction of fraud. It allows other people to learn
things from your data which you were not able to learn about, it allows
calibration of other models, it allows people to, three years later,
reanalyse your data with new techniques."

Ivan Oransky, editor of the
Retraction Watch blog
that collects examples of retracted papers, argues: "The reason the public
stops trusting institutions is when [its members] say things like, 'There's
nothing to see here, let us handle it,' and then they find out about
something bad that happened that nobody handled. That's when mistrust
builds.The big challenges that face humanity, says Casadevall, are
scientific ones -- climate change, a new pandemic, the fact that most of our
calories are coming from a very few plants, which are susceptible to new
pests. "These are the big problems and humanity's defence against them is
science. We need to make the enterprise work better."

Malpractice and misconduct

The South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-suk,
rose to international acclaim in 2004 when he announced, in the journal
Science, that he had extracted stem cells from cloned human embryos. The
following year, Hwang published results showing he had made stem cell lines
from the skin of patients -- a technique that could help create personalised
cures for people with degenerative diseases. By 2006, however, Hwang's
career was in tatters when it emerged that he had fabricated material for
his research papers. Seoul National University sacked him and, after an
investigation in 2009, he was
convicted of embezzling research funds.

Around the same time, a
Norwegian researcher, Jon Sudbe, admitted to fabricating and falsifying
data. Over many years of malpractice, he perpetrated one of the biggest
scientific frauds ever carried out by a single researcher -- the fabrication
of an entire 900-patient study, which was published in the Lancet in 2005.

Marc Hauser, a psychologist at Harvard University whose research
interests included the evolution of morality and cognition in non-human
primates, resigned in August 2011 after a three-year investigation by his
institution found he was responsible for eight counts of scientific
misconduct. The alarm was raised by some of his students, who disagreed with
Hauser's interpretations of experiments that involved the, somewhat
subjective, procedure of working out a monkey's thoughts based on its
response to some sight or sound.

Hauser last week
admitted to making "mistakes" that led to the findings of research
misconduct. "I let important details get away from my control, and as head
of the lab, I take responsibility for all errors made within the lab,
whether or not I was directly involved," says Hauser in a statement sent to
Nature. The doubts over Hauser's work affect a whole field of scientific
work that uses the same research technique.